Samantha Erised and I have been trying to get a date to shoot together for such a long time. Finally in 2016, we seemingly got a date sorted & Sam drove up from Bristol to spend a day with me shooting – in my backyard of all places.

As most of you know – I am a digital photographer. Born and raised in the digital era & up until this very shoot I had never loaded & shot then processed my own images.  What made this shoot even more fun than usual was that I shot a few rolls of 120 on a Mamiya RZ67 along side my customised Fujifilm X-Pro2.

(Want to order an the X-Pro2 – click here)

I used the Cactus V6 to sync the flash to the Mamiya – which worked perfectly well. As I needed quite a powerful punch I synced them to my 400w heads- which were used just as a bare bulb for most of the shots.  The same lighting set up was used for the Fuji shots.

Loving this set up – finally getting to share the images shot with @misserised . Check out the blog for more info about the shoot. #mamiya #rz67 #model

A photo posted by Dave Kai-Piper Photography (@davekaipiper) on Mar 26, 2016 at 7:14am PDT

We used a Fuji Superia X-tra 120 to shoot with and matched the settings on the Plustek OpticFilm 120 scanner when concerting them to digital. The black whites were just done using a simple layer in Photoshop. I was having quite a bit of fun at the scanning stage and really love the final shot in this short set where I have scanned in a bit of the side neg.  Not sure if this is the ‘done’ thing but I like it.

You can pick up the Superia X-Tra 35mm here – http://tidd.ly/67af4b0b. I used 120 for the Mamiya though.

It’s super to nice to work with lovely people & Sam is just adorable. Check out more of her amazing work here : https://purpleport.com/portfolio/misserised/

It was a pleasure finally working with Dave Kai-Piper and had s lovely day shooting and generally having a giggle. He showed me the world of strawberry flavoured coffee, made sure that I was kept warm (most of the time) and kept me giggling throughout. He is a talented man and I’m super happy with all of the images. – Sam

Shooting film is fun & printing is fun too – but I do love all the advantages of shooting digital. Shooting both seems to be a nice blend. I had the digital edits done and sorted about 2 weeks before I had the time to even look at the negs from the film shoot. I also must admit that I have still so much to learn with film. It’s a road I think I am going to really enjoy doing down – but not sure how much time I really will have to get into this with the right amount of dedication it will require.

Here are some of the files shot with my X-Pro2.  I still think because the response time is far quicker both Sam and I felt more comfy with the digital camera. We could see what we was getting and refine it as we went – thus getting better images ?  I dunno – I feel that that way but which images do you prefer ?  Digital are all below – film scans are all above.

If you want to check out my thoughts about the Fujifilm X-Pro2 – click this link !

In total there are 34 images we selected from the shoot – you can see them all here